When it comes to employer branding, the voice of your employees is the most important tool to use. Their perspectives, experiences, and stories bring your employer brand to life in tangible and authentic ways. So how can you share these insights? Start creating employee spotlights.
Employee spotlights amplify these voices, giving your employees a platform to connect with candidates and even other employees!
There are a lot of ways to incorporate this content into your recruitment marketing strategy. How you approach it depends on your bandwidth, available resources, which options are more attractive to your people, and what makes the most sense for your employer brand.
5 Employee Spotlight Examples
Not sure which platforms or formats to use when telling your employer branding and employee stories? Here are 5 employee spotlight examples to consider when planning your recruitment marketing strategy.
Blogs
Blogging is one of the most popular ways to share your employees’ stories. In fact, many companies even have a blog feature on their career site so they can share company news, insights into the culture, details about benefit offerings, and more.
However, blogs that usually get the most interest and engagement specifically feature employees. Examples of these employee spotlights are posts written by the employee, written by the company (such as a team spotlight) with employee quotes scattered throughout, or written as a Q&A editorial piece.
Whichever format you choose, be sure to include call-outs and headlines to make it easy for the reader to scan for the information they care most about.
Video
Video has quickly become another popular choice for employer branders, especially with new platforms to create user generated and live videos. Years before, employer branding videos could be time-consuming and costly, as many companies opted for high-production videos. But with the growth of social media features like Stories and live steaming, the need to create highly polished videos isn’t as crucial.
For videos, you can go the route of produced videos, user generated, or live. (More on that here.) However, a new option for formatting videos came to light during COVID-19. With many people working from home, and with companies going remote-first or fully remote, the option to create engaging videos became challenging. Watching Zoom-like videos got tiring because we were all getting Zoom fatigue as it was, so some companies got creative in their approach to videos: they used illustration. See an example of what Nestlé has done here.
No matter which option you go for, make sure you include captions. Many people watch videos with sound off, so including captions can increase the likelihood of people watching your videos to the end.
Audio
Podcasting is another option for sharing employee stories. With many people on the go, juggling a million things a minute, they might not have time to read a blog or watch a video. Therefore, audio can get your employee stories out there when people can’t sit down and stare at a screen.
What’s great about audio employee spotlights is that they can be repurposed. For example, some people will record a Zoom call so there’s a video version of it. Then they’ll pull the audio for audio-only type podcasts. From there, some choose to transcribe the audio version into a blog format and for shorter social media posts. How about that? You basically created four content formats from one employee spotlight!
If you’re looking to create video versions of your audio, you can use Headliner App. This tool pulls the audio and creates a video version. You can add photos/videos and captions too. This is a great tool if you want to share on social media or if you want to embed it into other content.
Employee Advocacy
What better way to share your employees’ voices than by empowering them to use it directly? There are plenty of employee advocacy tools such as GaggleAmp or Bambu that allow employees to reshare content and add their own commentary or even suggest content for the company to share.
Other ways you can increase employee advocacy is by giving them prompts, digital assets, hashtags, or tools to encourage people to post directly on their social networking sites like Instagram, LinkedIn, and so on. For example, if you send new hire swag to an employee, include a note encouraging them to share a photo with their LinkedIn network using your employer branding hashtag.
Or if you see employees using the hashtag, reach out to ask if you can repost their content to your company’s social sites. Not only are employees excited to get recognized in this way, but these posts tend to get the most engagement because they are more genuine.
Digital Events
Hosting or sponsoring an in-person event can be timely and expensive. Also, these events might not be convenient for candidates to attend. For instance, if you’re hosting a career fair at your headquarters in the suburbs after work, it might be hard for people to leave their workplace or homes and fight through rush hour traffic to get there in time.
Not to mention, people might not be willing to commit that much time and effort to a company they’re not super familiar with. Or maybe they’re currently working and don’t want to tip off their employers that they’re looking.
Digital events can be a great way to connect with candidates in a private, safe, and easy way. Not only can the attendees hop on from anywhere, but you can also include more of your employees on the call who might be distributed in other locations.
These events are a low-key way for candidates to ask employees questions about their specific job, learn about what the hiring managers are looking for, understand what the day-to-day is like, and so on.
The event can also be recorded and shared on your employer branding platforms or via recruiter communications so it can reach a wider audience for months to come.
In Conclusion
Test out these different options and see what sticks. Perhaps you’ll find a certain content format or platform gets the most engagement, or maybe how a story is told will increase the likelihood that an employee will want to participate. The results might surprise you. It’s all about trial and error.
Keep measuring your results to see what’s worth your effort and time. However, the most important thing you should remember is to have fun with it! If employees are enjoying themselves and feel safe to be open and honest, this will show through authenticity in the content you create, resonating with candidates better.
Need help developing employee spotlight content? Harlow offers content development services. Contact us here to learn more.
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